FCC Prods More Cities to Go Big With 1-Gig

Call it the Google Fiber Effect. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Julius Genachowski issued the Gigabit City Challenge late last week, calling on mayors and ISPs to build at least one community in all 50 states with 1Gbit/s speeds by 2015 -- blowing away the 4Mbit/s downstream by 1Mbit/s upstream benchmarks the agency uses now to define "broadband." He said a national commitment, that will include an "online clearinghouse" of best practices on how to reduce broadband deployment costs, will accelerate a critical mass of markets with "ultra-fast Internet speeds."

The FCC should have little trouble hitting the goal. The agency, citing Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) Council data, says 42 communities in 14 states already have hit the mark. A high-profile city in that group, of course, is Kansas City, Kan., which got access to 1Gbit/s service from Google Fiber last fall. If the cable guys decide to help (or get shamed into helping) the Chairman reach this new deployment goal, look for operators to free up more channels for bonding. The latest Docsis 3.0 cable modems are capable of bonding 24 downstream channels -- enough to produce data bursts near 1 Gbit/s. (See FCC: Broadband Starts at 4Mbit/s, More Docsis 3.0 Gateways Gun for 1-Gig,
and Google's Pointy Stick.)

Pay-TV operators and their programming partners are trying to put TV Everywhere services on tablets, PCs and smartphones, but not everybody is using them. Just 17 percent of pay-TV subs have streamed authenticated TV Everywhere services, The Wall Street Journal reports, citing a 1,000-person study by GfK Media. One big obstacle is the authentication process itself -- 70 percent of those surveyed who have ever watched video online said they'd be deterred from viewing it that way if it required them to sign in. Among other findings, 37 percent accessed online video directly from a programmer's website or app, while just 30 percent said they hooked in via portals operated by their pay-TV operator.

Dish Network Corp. will close another 300 Blockbuster Inc. stores nationwide in the coming weeks, reducing its total to about 500, reports The Denver Post, noting that the move will also result in the loss of about 3,000 jobs. Dish closed about 500 stores last year, and continues to close down underperforming outlets or those that are nearing the end of their leases, the paper adds. Dish bought the bankrupt video rental chain in 2011 for $320 million, and has been trying to make something of the acquisition by bundling Blockbuster's by-mail DVD rental and video streaming services into Dish's subscription-TV packages. (See Dish's Latest Buy Is a Blockbuster and Dish Bundles Up Blockbuster.)

Competitive cable overbuilder WideOpenWest Holdings LLC (WOW) has hired Richard Fish as CFO. Fish most recently was COO of Northwoods Capital Management LLC and CFO of ICG Communications and ITC DeltaCom, a competitive local exchange carrier (CLEC) that formerly operated in the southern U.S.

re: FCC Prods More Cities to Go Big With 1-Gig Good point. I'll also be interested to see how the FCC defines how a community can be counted as a 1-Gig community. If they include university networks in that equation, that will certainly help the tally rise more rapidly. JB

re: FCC Prods More Cities to Go Big With 1-Gig Hello Jeff & Teresa-I think there may be ways of obtaining 1 Gbps networks without municipalities having to build them. The Gig U initiative also has the goal of jump-starting the creation of 1 Gig networks in university communities & they've had some success with persuading carriers to make some deployments of that sort. The ability to achieve Genachowski's goal may depend on how you define a "community." if it's an entire city, that could be challenging. But if it could include parts of cities near universities, I think you could see the goal being met in some new states.

re: FCC Prods More Cities to Go Big With 1-Gig I think you were correct to link the FCC's move to Google Fiber. This gives political cover to Google that could prove to be valuable should it decide to expand its service provider aspirations beyond Kansas City. It's a not-too-subtle way of endorsing Google versus cable and other ISPs. Follow the bouncing ball. -á

re: FCC Prods More Cities to Go Big With 1-Gig that's some interesting insight...Then some of this will have to fall on incumbent providers, not just munis...but will those incumbents have-á much motivation to follow through if this goal doesn't have any real teeth to it? JB

re: FCC Prods More Cities to Go Big With 1-Gig Well, considering that 19 states have regulation that prevents munis from offering telecommunications services - will make this "goal" challenging.-á Here is our view on it: http://broadbandtrends.com/blo...

re: FCC Prods More Cities to Go Big With 1-Gig I suppose this sort of declaration would be good news for US municipalities, though I don't know what kind of teeth this goal really has.-á Also, it's another easily filled goal... it wasn't all that long about that the FCC was talking about a "100 Squared" initiative ( http://www.lightreading.com/ft... of seeing 100-Mbit/s services available to 100 million households by 2020. JB

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